


Long Night, White Hell

by Anonymous



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Dubious Consent, Handcuffed Together, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-11 07:16:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11709507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Once the Domingre Gang gets their upper hand, they want an evening's entertainment.  Warren and Mannix just want an opportunity to escape.  (Well.  Maybe a few other things.)





	Long Night, White Hell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spock/gifts).



> I want to acknowledge up-front that I fucked up and totally misunderstood some kink definitions, and I'm really sorry that that happened. As a gift, I messed this one up badly through a very dumb mistake, and spock was incredibly kind about that, and so has my sincerest thanks in addition to my apologies.

Now Minnie’s stank of blood and burnt coffee.

“I didn’t know that much could come out of a man,” Warren said. He kept his voice low. “Least not without stringing him up by the heels, cuttin’ his throat. That sounds about like something you might’ve gone in for, so what do you figure? You figure this for regular?”

Mannix didn’t make a peep. He was still all blanched, as colorless as boiled custard and evidently about that spineless, too. But his hands, shackled up tight against Warren’s, were sweaty rather than shaky, and that gave Warren some sliver of hope. White boy had had a little bit of grit in him before to sling those irons back at John Ruth, coldly nope out of riding into Red Rock in chains; had had brains enough to see through the Lincoln letter. So maybe, maybe, just maybe.

Warren tried again. “The way that cup popped out of your hands, it was like it’d burned you.”

Still nothing, dammit.

He couldn’t risk yelling and if he couldn’t yell, the only thing was to go quieter.

“Chris Mannix, unless they cut your tongue out of your mouth when I wasn’t looking, you better open the fuck up and say something.”

A long sigh, like Mannix was some put-upon saint, and then: “What’ve you got to say that’s worth me talking back to?”

“That’s better. How about a plan to get us out of this?”

Dry husk of a laugh this time. “Oh, you got one of those, Major? It come with a saw gonna cut through these chains?”

“Gotten out of chains before, haven’t I?”

“Well now,” Mannix said. “Well, that is interesting. I suppose you have.” He was starting to sound a little more like himself, and the world had turned askew enough for Warren to appreciate it. “You’re a man of relevant experience.”

“Glad to see you’ve come to your senses.”

Daisy Domergue and her gang of undercover assholes had gotten their first round of drinks in them now, and that boozy, celebratory mood of theirs was starting to turn, Warren could feel it. People didn’t get thousands of dollars pinned on their heads for being angel-faced sweethearts, no matter how twinkly-eyed that brother of hers was. Whatever had stayed their hands on killing him and Mannix, it wasn’t mercy, wasn’t pity. Mercy or pity would have had them spare Minnie, anyhow, not the likes of anybody here.

They were happy, and the happiness of dangerous people could be dangerous in itself. Warren had felt peachy-fucking-keen when he’d burned that prisoner camp at Wellenbeck: hell, the first match had done for his own wall, and he’d kept going with the rest of the pack to take the whole place to cinders. Him wearing a smile the whole damn time. So.

Oswaldo—or whoever the fuck he was—looked over at the two of them and tugged on his mustaches, a move that reminded Warren of John Ruth, which shouldn’t have meant anything to him one way or the other.

“I do believe we’ve forgotten our guests,” he said in that fake toffee accent of his. Then he dropped it like it was nothing but a shiny toy, the distraction he’d made out of it to begin with. “If we have party favors, I think we might as well have games.”

Daisy was sitting on the table, her legs swinging back and forth. “Yeah, a party sounds good.”

“I’d think getting out of here would sound better,” Mannix said.

She laughed. “You out of your mind, Chris Mannix? You hear that blizzard outside? I’d have an icicle dangling off my twat if I tried to get out there.”

“Mexico sounds better every minute, don’t it?” Brother Jody said.

“Honey, you got that right.”

“But in the meantime?” said Joe Gage.

Daisy tilted her head, considering them as avidly as a bird deciding whether or not to eat a worm. “Aw, hell, I kind of get a kick out of our sheriff of Red Rock here.”

“He’s not really the sheriff,” Bob said. He shrugged. “I met their sheriff once.”

“No,” Mannix said, “you met the _old_ sheriff. I’m the _new_ sheriff.”

“Well, I’m the new queen of fucking England,” Oswaldo said. “I mean, it’s your call, Daisy, Jody, but I’d just as soon not leave any witnesses.”

“Especially not one that talks so much,” Joe Gage said.

Warren rattled their handcuffs a little, shaking the chain against the floor. It wrenched his wrists some—the assholes had one set of cuffs doing the work of two with him and Mannix both jammed through the same pair, barely wide enough even at its loosest point to accommodate them both. But he didn’t mind doing it, for the sake of the point, and Mannix didn’t make any protest.

“You all seemed to be forgetting about me. Or am I what you’d call a done and decided deal?”

“He’s the one I might really argue for,” Oswaldo said. “That letter of his was well-done, I have to admit. Holding onto one lie for so many years suggests he can keep a secret, and it wouldn’t do us any harm to have an in-pocket bounty hunter.”

Jody’s gaze found Warren’s. He smiled, or at least his lips flexed in the imitation of a smile, but Warren saw the bottom fall out of that charm of his: this was pure vivisection, smile and look both like a scalpel turned into Warren’s skin. “No. I don’t think he’s the in-pocket type.”

“Safest thing is to kill them both,” Gage said.

“Major,” Mannix said, with real pepper in his voice now, like he was offended, “him in particular I don’t like at all.”

Warren traced one thumb up the center of Mannix’s palm: _hold steady_. _Wait for them to decide_. Unbelievably, Mannix took the hint and buttoned up his mouth.

Their lives got tossed back and forth some more like a hot potato, but there was no chance, Warren saw quickly enough, of playing any one of them off the others: they were all as cozy as five fingers on a hand. The arguing was sport, just one more party game to kill the boredom of being snowed-in and dull the whine and roar of the wind. Hell, in a way, his best chance was to let the fucking Domingre gang have the fun of endless fucking witty banter about who would kill who and how it’d get done and which of them it was that’d come up with the notion to skin that one fellow back in El Paso, which was the current subject. Let them talk and drink and soak in their fond little reunion.

But if they hadn’t gotten the prices on their heads for being sweethearts, they hadn’t gotten them for being stupid, either, and it was a little after midnight, and a little after the third bottle of whiskey, that Jody Domingre found a lull and filled it.

“You know, I think Pete had the right idea from the beginning.”

(“Who the fuck is Pete?” Mannix whispered.

Warren sighed. “Oswaldo. English Pete.”

“If my name were Pete, I don’t think I’d go trading it in for ‘Oswaldo,’ whether I needed an alias or not.”)

“More than likely,” Oswaldo said. He pointed at Jody, his hand swerving a little with drunkenness. “Remind me what it was again?”

Jody, now. Jody wasn’t drunk at all. “Here we are having a get-together in honor of us getting reunited with my dear sister Daisy and here we have us two party favors, these two gentlemen here. Now,” he addressed this to Warren, “ordinarily, we aren’t what you’d call cruel.”

“What would you say if I said you and I might have different understandings of what’s cruel and what ain’t?”

“Coming from you,” Daisy said, taking another swig from her bottle, “that’s pretty rich. Toasted those blue and gray boys both like—like toast. Toasted ‘em like toast. Didn’t he, Mannix?”

“He surely did,” Mannix said, his voice nice and level. “It cannot be denied the Major’s got himself a history.”

Jody smiled. “Now, I was just thinking that it’s funny you should mention that. Because down there in the basement, in between trying to stomp some rats to pulp just as quietly as I could, because this woman kept a fine house but a _nasty_ cellar, I had nothing to occupy my mind but the goings-on above.”

“The living drama,” Oswaldo offered.

“That’s just it, Pete. It exactly. The living drama. Like Major Warren here putting in a bullet in our dear departed General Smithers.”

“Bet you regret that now, huh?” Mannix said softly. “Him at least not being one of them.”

“ _Him_ I would have killed three times over, don’t tell me about my fucking priorities.” He raised his voice to Jody. “Yeah, I killed that motherfucker deader than a doornail.”

“We have the doornails,” Bob said. So Bob was drunk, too. Bob, and Oswaldo, and Daisy, but not Jody. Too soon to say about Joe Gage, though as far as Warren could tell he’d been putting it away with the rest of them.

“It’s the story you told him that I’m intrigued by,” Jody said. “Was it true?”

Warren didn’t have so many good times left, however long he lived, that he wanted to pass up denying one. “You know it was.”

“Then there you go,” Jody said, spreading out his hands. “That’s our evening’s entertainment. Living drama and party favors all in one.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Mannix said irritably.

Warren clamped one hand down on his wrist and felt the sudden clamminess of his skin: so he did know, after all. He put up a good front. Warren could almost admire that, maybe.

“Oh, I like that,” Daisy said. “You’re forgetting we got just the one pair of shackles, though.”

Jody shrugged. “So we’ll use rope on one of them.” He bit his lip. “Mannix isn’t as likely to get loose, use it on him.”

“Fuck you, Jody Doe-ming-gray,” Mannix said, biting into each syllable like it was as juicy as a piece of fruit.

“Likely, no,” Oswaldo said, “but more motivated, I’d think. I mean, all things being equal, I know which one I’d rather be in this little tableau you have in mind.”

“Tableau,” Joe Gage repeated, with a little rumble of amusement in his voice. Still not enough for Warren to judge the level of fucking liquor in his blood.

“When you put it that way, I agree. Warren, then, but let’s get on with it.” Jody gestured to Gage. “Get their hands in order. Behind the back on both.”

Gage tipped a salute and started walking over.

They had seconds, and no privacy except what they could get by whispering, so he whispered and tried to make good use of his time. “Fight me enough that you get my back up against the wall, and then you settle fucking in and don’t expect to finish soon. I can get my hands free, and when I do, situation’s going to change in our favor quick. When it does, you keep your eye on Joe Gage, can you do that?”

No sense addressing the whole herd of elephants in the room—what it was exactly that they were about to have to do, how little reason Warren had to trust Mannix to cooperate, how little reason Mannix had to trust Warren to have an actual plan, one that included the both of them, and him as something other than a pretty-mouthed cocksucker. Other things, too. The limitations of Mannix’s ability to do shit about shit with his hands stuck behind his back.

How hard he was, that was another one. Even if Mannix couldn’t know it yet.

But Mannix, exhaling, said, “Yessir,” and said nothing else in the moment before Joe Gage levered him, and Warren with him, up vertical.

Gage burst out laughing and Warren could hear it in his laugh even when he hadn’t been able to hear it for sure in his voice—the man was stone-cold sober, like he’d never had so much as a drop. “Oh, that’s a treat.”

“You can shut the fuck up,” Warren said.

“No, Major, I can just about promise you’ll like this joke yourself, just as soon as I can get the two of you situated.”

“Now,” Jody said in that little drawl of his, “you can tell I’ve got a gun pointed at you, Major, so you don’t go doing anything rash. Grouch, I’m thinking you can handle our would-be sheriff.”

“Just like water rolling downhill,” Joe Gage said.

It was an infuriatingly slow process, getting their hands separated from each others, getting Warren’s tied behind his back, getting Mannix’s cuffed nice and tight behind his; Warren loathed it because it meant standing there like a jackass, waiting to get bound up again. But as much as he hated the feel of anything around his wrists—and he did hate it even more than he hated what it meant—he could almost feel the bead Jody Domingre had drawn on him.

Warren ranked survival above dignity. Pride was above survival, but they hadn’t gotten at his pride yet, not quite.

If he’d been in Mannix’s boots, this would have done it for him: they’d have sent him to hell before he would have gotten down on his knees for a goddamn Confederate or, for that matter, any fucking white man at all.

Luckily Mannix and pride didn’t seem to be on speaking terms with each other, because by the end of it, he was down on the floor—and had he forgotten what Warren had told him to do? That brainless little shit, he wasn’t struggling at all; Warren’s back was still half a foot from the wall he needed Mannix to put him up against.

Hell, maybe he’d seen what Warren had for him—from the angle, Mannix looking up at him from the floor, it was a hard thing to deny—and gone stupid with fear.

No. Mannix’s eyes were on his, and they were calm. Gunfighter calm and ready for blood.

Then he saw the joke Joe Gage had been so fucking sure he would find funny. Mannix was hard himself; cock straining against the tight front of his trousers.

Maybe he hadn’t forgotten to fight. Maybe he just didn’t want to.

Now, a white man who knew his place was a novelty, but novelty wouldn’t save their skins.

So Warren had that laugh he’d been promised and then looked over Mannix’s head to Joe Gage’s filthy fucking smirk and said, “I don’t like them half as well like this, all willing.”

“Willing?” Daisy hooted. “Willing?”

Gage nodded. “Your sheriff’s got a hard-on to rival the major’s.”

“Like I said.” Oswaldo waved one hand around. “Entertainment for us all.”

“Fuck that shit, though,” Daisy said. “I ain’t arguing any which way anymore on saving his life, he’s that excited to get some black cock in his mouth.”

“What’s the matter, Mannix?” Warren said. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Pussy sure don’t,” Daisy said.

But Mannix just licked his lips, so nice and slow that something in Warren’s groin tightened like a screw, and said, “I believe y’all got me mistaken, you think you know what I’m looking forward to. See, you can maybe force my mouth down on somebody’s prick, but you can’t keep it open.” Then he rocked himself forward on his knees and slammed himself headfirst into Warren, a growl coming out from behind his teeth like he was some animal.

Warren hit the wall. That was one way to do it. The most irritating fucking way.

It took a bit for Joe Gage to wrestle them apart again, and Warren managed to keep himself glued to the wall, his hands now picking at the rope. He had to be careful, had to go slowly. Too much movement and they would see his shoulders twitching.

“I think he said he’s going to bite your dick off,” Bob said.

“Yeah,” Warren said. “I ain’t hard of hearing.”

“That I’ll enjoy seeing,” Gage said, “but it better wait until the third or fourth time, I’m thinking, because why should the fun end early?”

“When the blizzard’s just started,” Daisy said, “or near enough.”

She had glittering eyes. Warren could see the sheen of them all the way across the room. Back among her own people, she had even more savoir-fucking-faire than she’d had before. Goody for her.

“If this were turned around, I might agree with you. Since it’s not, I’d just as soon keep my trousers buttoned.”

“Objection noted and rejected,” Jody said. “Help him, Grouch.”

“You the low man on the totem pole, ain’t you?” Mannix said, and his eyes were glittery too. He hadn’t lost wood either. “You fetch and carry for that bitch and her brother?”

“Nice try.” Gage maneuvered Warren out. Even as stiff as he was, Warren got nothing out of that touch; Gage’s fingers might as well have been sticks. What he wanted was elsewhere. “But I don’t got a problem doing what I like doing for the people I love.”

“That’s sweet,” Warren said. “Ain’t that sweet, Chris?”

“Like sugar, Major.”

Jody said, “I believe we were promised a show.”

“Oh, you know you’ll get one, motherfucker,” Mannix said. There was hatred in his voice, sharp as a razor.

Then, without any more preamble, he got his lips around Warren’s cock and started to work.

Chris Mannix’s mouth was the warmest thing in the room, hotter even than the fire. It hit like such a shock that Warren came close to forgetting what he was supposed to be doing with his hands, and Warren never forgot a damned thing. But eventually he did remember, and it took less time than he’d thought to get his hands free: whatever skills Joe Gage might have had, he’d have made a poor fucking sailor if that was how well he could tie a knot. It took so little time that he probably could have even managed a way to signal to Mannix that he’d done it, that Mannix was good to hop off his johnson whenever he liked.

But who fought well with a hard-on? And who the hell turned down a blowjob anyway?

Especially not this one. Mannix was _needy_ —white boy had minimal talent, or at least minimal skill, but he sucked on Warren like he loved cock so much he wanted to wallow in it, wanted to make his life’s work out of it. He forced his head down so far Warren grazed the back of his throat and felt it spasm, felt Mannix try to swallow around him. Mannix’s tongue so wet and willing it was an advertisement for fucking in general, fucking him in particular.

“What are you thinking?” Warren said, all quiet again, though this part he figured they could all hear if they were desperate to. “You thinking you’re dying anyway? Going to hell anyway? Might as well go out with a bellyful of come?”

And damn if Mannix didn’t moan a little around him. That finished him off. He came like a trigger inside him had been pulled.

The bastards applauded, as well they should. He was half-tempted to do it himself, just to see the look on their faces when they saw those hands of his coming up in front of him.

Mannix swallowed, which at that point didn’t surprise Warren any. He figured Mannix for taking whatever he gave him.

“A real son of the South,” Warren said. “That famous hospitality.”

That was the only moment Mannix turned prune-sour, when his mouth puckered in a way that was less than inviting. But no, even that was a welcome, or could be turned into one. The son-of-a-bitch wanted to be overruled, convinced, _sweetened_.

“He should get to finish too, I think,” Bob said.

Mannix licked his lips again, his mouth wetter but his tongue dryer. “I don’t want—I ain’t that way.”

“Nah,” Daisy said, just talking to Bob. “Speaking from experience, you shackle him in the front, his balance gets good enough that he gets dangerous. So he can hump himself against his nigger friend’s leg or he can do without. Unless we want a switcheroo, get him up and get _Major Marquis Warren_ down on the ground and ready to please.”

“That what you want, _cherie_?” Jody said.

“Man punched me in the mouth.”

Mannix kind of scoff-laughed, half-delighted: “Major Warren! Damn, did you really? Good for you, I hope you knocked her fucking silly. What’d she do to piss you off that I didn’t get around to?”

“Spat that trashy spit of hers on the Lincoln letter.”

“What,” Oswaldo said, “the _fake_?”

“Fake or not, I put thought into it, and it’s got sentimental value.”

“And it shores up your pretty story for John Ruth, may he rest in peace.” Mannix glanced over at the bodies and looked almost momentarily solemn: seriousness suited him, made that long, all-cheekbones face of his less goofy. He’d looked fine enough with his mouth full of cock, too, so maybe those were the options for him, the ways he ought to be kept. Somber or sucking.

Jody was talking now, distantly, about what he thought ought to be done with a man who laid hands on his sister. The question of punishment seemed to take up a lot of the room.

It gave him a chance, if a slim one, to look down at Mannix, raise his eyebrows: _Can you move?_

He didn’t know why he trusted Mannix to know what he meant, like he thought Mannix had swallowed his thinking along with his spunk. But Mannix smiled, lips slick and red, and said, very softly, “Oh, you know I am,” which wasn’t entirely right as an answer to the question Warren had been asking but was, fuck it, close enough. Warren smiled back.

They’d taken his gun but not his knife, and his fingers knew that polished weight of it as well as any lover had ever known tit or cock or tongue or pussy. Let me not to the marriage of true hate admit impediments.

Warren moved.

It’d been a long time since he’d had to throw a knife, but his aim held true: he buried that sucker in Jody Domingre’s chest. At first he thought the sound he heard, the hard _thwock_ , was it jamming in up to the haft, but that was really just Mannix, Mannix being in a manner of speaking the knife he had thrown at Joe Gage. He liked the sound of that, the sound of all of that: the knife going in, Gage going to the ground, and Mannix being his to use as he liked.

Mannix got his shackles around Gage’s throat; Warren got Gage’s gun.

They painted Minnie’s red.

*

“When I think of how often I was piss-drunk back during the war,” Mannix said, rubbing at his wrists to get the feeling back in them, “and seeing now just how poorly drunk men fight, I feel lucky to be alive.”

“You should feel lucky to be alive anyway,” Warren said. “All things considered.”

“I’m trying to take what you’d call a historical perspective.”

Warren put another Mexican blanket down over John Ruth, shrouding him a little—he wasn’t sentimental enough to break his back trying to dig a grave in frozen ground, not even after the blizzard let up, but he was respectful enough to want to give him some kind of cover. Mannix watched like he was trying to memorize how to use a particular kind of fork and then went and got a blanket for OB and laid it out across him, shooting a quick glance at Warren. Warren nodded.

Mannix crooked up one corner of his mouth. “And if—being chained up like I was—I’d taken a bullet in all that, Major, would you have done it for me?”

“Covered you? Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

Warren wasn’t going to repeat himself.

“But not Smithers,” Mannix said.

“Smithers is outside,” Warren said, “and I wouldn’t go outside in this shit to cover up my own dear departed mother, but either way, no. The question is would you.” He didn’t say it like it was a question. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer, and he _was_ sure he didn’t want to know why he was asking.

Mannix hesitated and then, almost rolling the word around in his mouth to taste it, said, “No.” Then he kind of shrugged and grinned. “Not with you around at least, black major.”

It had to be three o’clock in the morning. He was exhausted down to his bones.

He took Chris Mannix to bed. Fuck it. Being that tired was like being drunk, only with the benefit of still being able to get it up. He got a second blowjob out of it, Mannix trying this time to keep his eyes closed. He didn’t like that as much. He settled one hand down around the back of Mannix’s head, sort of cradling it, and it was maybe tender and maybe how he had held Daisy’s with the muzzle of his gun against her temple. Maybe both.

Mannix touched him back, like this was something it wasn’t, like he wasn’t thinking of any of the other bodies in the room, only Warren’s: skimmed his hands up Warren’s thighs and then got one hand around Warren’s dick and worked what his mouth couldn’t reach now that he was less ambitious. And by the end he had his eyes open again after all.

Warren laid him flat on the bed and stroked him lazily, sleepily.

“I shouldn’t,” Mannix said about halfway through.

It was his climax he was throwing away, so let him be a coward about it. It was kind of funny, that this was when he wanted to call it quits, not with Warren’s cock in his mouth but with his cock in Warren’s hand. So fuck it, let him.

But Warren didn’t stop. “I’m done with your mouth for the night. No more talking.”

Mannix laid his head back against the pillows and sighed. Warren got him off about five minutes later, Mannix by that point rolled over against him, his forehead against Warren’s collarbone. He came on Warren’s still-soft cock—fuck how old he was, in better days he would have been good to go again already—and then cleaned it off with his mouth without being told.

“Good boy,” Warren said, and Mannix shivered like he was coming down with a fever. Warren tilted his chin up. “You were always a good boy, weren’t you?”

Mannix shook his head. “You ain’t been paying attention at all, Major. I’ve never been good.” He put his hands across his stomach, looking contemplative, which couldn’t have come naturally to him. “Neither have you.”

“Once,” Warren said, because he could sort of remember. “But not in any of the time you’ve been alive.”

Mannix absorbed that silently and then said, “Well, anyway, I wasn’t.”

Then he had wanted to be. Warren could almost smell it on him, punky like sweat, like come. He could press the matter, but he didn’t. Maybe after the snow had stopped, after the roads were clear, after the question of where they were going would have to come up. If they hadn’t killed each other by then. They’d talk.


End file.
